RelateIQ: A hush, hush data-savvy startup

There are a thousand, maybe more hot startups in Silicon Valley at any one moment, but one name that’s popped up a few times this summer has been RelateIQ, a startup supposedly doing next-generation customer relationship management with some very data-savvy founders and investors.

The company’s web site is fairly bare, but the pitch to folks has been that RelateIQ will track your digital life and then suggest actions to take and people to call. I’ve been told by investors that I should think of it as the next generation of personal assistant technology based on machine learning that I’ve been waiting for. Those investors, including Accel, Morgenthaler and SV Angel, have put at least $1.25 million in funding into the company.

Because it probably wants to sell its service, RelateIQ plans to target enterprises as a next-generation CRM play as opposed to helping normal people remember to pick up the milk on the way home after seeing an email exchange between spouses. DJ Patil (former LinkedIn data scientist) is involved and CTO and co-founder Adam Evans is the former CTO of Palantir Health. Palantir is the secretive Silicon Valley data mining startup that’s growing like crazy.

And a quick scan of LinkedIn profiles associated with the startup indicate that data mining and machine learning are two big areas where it has made recent hires. That fits if RelateIQ really hopes to build software that’s intelligent enough to scan your inboxes and/or social contacts to understand when and how often you should reach out to people. Top sales people already track this sort of thing, but having a computer analyze when that might be most effective may make a good salesman into a great one.

The company recently had its trademark approved and says in the application that it’s building:

Software as a service (SAAS) services featuring software in the field of customer, business and personal correspondence management for sharing, organizing, recording, reporting, charting and analyzing all of a user’s digital signals, namely, digital and electronic correspondence, emails, instant messages, calendar items, social media postings, phone calls by landline, cell and VoIP, voice messages, text messages and communications through a program’s Application Programming Interface.